Thursday, March 15, 2012

Home Cooking and How Did We Surive Growing Up

I feel like we are living in the early 1900s. I recently found out that I have Mal-absorption issues. I can't eat anything with fructose ( most all fruits, honey and sweeteners). If you are fructose intolerant, you can't have fructans which are found in wheat and rye I am also gluten intolerant. I also flunked the lactose test. It wasn't even that hard a test :(
It is almost easier to tell you what I can eat that what I cant.
I am cooking a very healthy diet for us. We eat fresh meat, (nothing processed), potatoes, vegetables and homemade freshly baked bread. I can have table sugar in small amounts, so desserts are also homemade.
When you look at our current diet, it is very similar to how we ate growing up. We didn't have convenience food or soda. We were a "meat and potato" family. Mom always had a garden and I remember that the carrots were the best freshly picked, some dirt still on them!!
How did we survive growing up??? The things we did would have us in foster care today and our parents in jail. How sad is that. We never got hurt very bad and neither did any of our friends. I always rode on the tractor with dad when I was little and it had NO CAB. The fenders were an awesome place to sit and there was a handle there too. There was no such thing as seat belts or car seats, gulp! Would I ever put a child in a car today with out one, NO.
We always stood up in the pickup seat next to dad. I was driving a tractor when I was 4. The Farm Labor Laws wouldn't even know where to start with that one. Dad would put the tractor in low gear, and throttle it down to a fairly slow pace. I would stand up so I could maneuver the big steering wheel and drive while he pitched hay off the wagon. My job was to drive and not hit any cattle. The clutch was the old hand lever engaged style on our John Deere 620. This was after our team was gone.
We lived too far from town to take swimming lessons and probably couldn't afford them if we were close enough. That didn't stop us from building makeshift rafts and going out on the sloughs. I shudder
to think how deep they were. I was terrified of water but went with my brother anyway. Mom strictly forbade us from going rafting, but we figured what she didn't know didn't hurt her. Evil Smirk. What rotten kids we were.
My sister and I could find lots of entertainment too. Our favorite was teasing the rooster. It didn't take long and he was mean to us! He would wait for us to come out side and chase us down to attack us with his spurs an beak. I think all three of us got in on riding calves behind the barn even tho that made dad angry.
My brother and I also had our go cart..... a 1947 pickup that we took the acetylene torch to and cut away everything but the chassis and engine. It was just like an oversize go cart. But, you had to lean out to see where you were driving, for some reason, and I remember running through fresh cow deposits and it flying into our faces. That took the fun out of chasing the gophers down.
Some fun mischievous memories, but that was pretty much how I rolled.
Until next time,
Thanks for stoppin by